A few more juicy bites in the VSSDK February 2006 CTP

In the rush to post about the CTP, I forgot to mention a few more things we've bundled in the Visual Studio SDK starting with this CTP:

  • DSL Toolkit: "Using Domain-Specific Language Tools, you can create a custom graphical designer that uses your domain-specific diagram notation. You can then create custom text templates that use models created in your designer to generate source code and other files. In this release, the validation framework makes it easy to apply constraints to the language and you can deploy the designer as a standard installer package for use within Visual Studio 2005 (except for Visual Studio Express Editions). However Domain-Specific Language Tools requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition or higher. Domain-Specific Language Tools is now included as a component of the Visual Studio SDK."
  • Visual Studio Tools for Applications : "The Visual Studio Tools for Applications Software Development Kit (SDK) contains the documentation, samples, tools, and a redistributable component that ISVs will use to integrate Visual Studio Tools for Applications into their applications. The redistributable software consists of both design-time and runtime components. The design-time part provides the IDE, the C# and Visual Basic .NET programming languages, and the extensibility features that enable the ISV to integrate the IDE into their application. The runtime portion provides support for loading, execution, and unloading of add-ins, as well as support for security management, versioning, and isolation between add-ins and the ISV’s application."

Go download it today (registration required) and please send us any feedback or suggestions you have!